Eventbrite: Hadoop isn’t for everybody

Open source solutions like the Hadoop distributed file system and HBase NoSQL database are justifiably the hot platforms in data warehousing, but MySQL and other more traditional enterprise data warehousing may still be optimal if a company has a good understanding of where it needs to scale and has big focus on security and reporting.

Hadoop’s open source community still hasn’t worked out the security kinks, and building the dashboards around reporting tools in Hadoop and Hbase is quite difficult, Sharma said. Security and reporting in enterprise data warehouse platforms are much better developed, he said.

“Since [Hadoop and Hbase] are very new, the entire code base has to mature a lot,” Sharma said. “So you end up having to do a lot of debugging yourself. You end up getting into the code base to understand what’s going on. … If you’re not willing to invest in a team around it, then probably Hadoop is not the best for you because the ecosystem is still maturing.”

The Hadoop and EDW worlds are merging: there are ‘traditional enterprise’ data warehouse tools and there are next-generation analytic tools.

Arguably Netezza was the first DB optimized for analytics. Then came row-column hybrids like Aster Data and Greenplum. Then came true column-stores like Vertica and InfiniDB, which are an order-of-magnitude faster.

Over the next year or two, look for the Hadoop and column-store worlds to become even more tightly integrated.